Hanging Time (16 page)

April took a deep breath. “The D.A.’s office is very busy. We can’t just get somebody to come over every time someone comes in to talk to us. Please, Mr. Block, just tell the sergeants here what you told me about Maggie.”

“And then you’ll get the D.A.?”

What was his thing about the D.A.?

“Look, I watch TV. I know you don’t indict without the D.A.”

He wanted an indictment. The guy had no priors, no
sheet of any kind. He hadn’t ever caught so much as a speeding or a parking ticket in his whole life, and he wanted to be indicted for the murder of Maggie Wheeler.

Sergeant Joyce checked her watch and made a move to get up. “Why don’t you give me a call later,” she said.

Block twitched. “Okay, okay. You don’t give a guy a break, do you?”

“Yeah, you have our full attention,” Sergeant Joyce told him, leaning back in her chair. “I’m here if you want to talk. I’m gone if you don’t.”

He looked at the wall again, rubbing his palms together. Now April could see he was sweating into his plaid shirt.

“Like I said, I went into The Last Mango, looking for the owner. Maggie had just come to work there, maybe a week before. She wasn’t the manager yet.”

“Did she become the manager?” Elsbeth Manganaro never said she was the manager.

“Oh, yeah, Maggie did almost everything in the store. Except she couldn’t fire that stupid bitch.”

Sanchez raised an eyebrow at April. Well, that part was true. Olga Yerger was no rocket scientist.

“Who would that be?” April asked for the tape.

“Olga, the helper. It’s her fault Maggie’s dead.”

“How is that?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at his hands. “We used to have lunch together—oh, every couple of weeks. It was kind of a regular thing. I stopped in on Saturday. Last Saturday, the day she—uh, died.”

April nodded.

“See, she liked to eat late—but Saturday she wouldn’t go out. That bitch hadn’t turned up again.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. The ponytail bobbed from side to side, and his face flushed with rage at Olga. “I told Maggie to just close the store for an hour, what’s the big deal? But she wouldn’t do it. She was scared Elsbeth might come by, see the store closed in the middle of the afternoon, and fire her. I don’t know. Elsbeth would do anything for Olga, but Maggie—I don’t know, she took advantage of Maggie. It happens to short people. It made me—” His little hand curled into a fist.

“So why didn’t you order in?” April had noticed there were no food containers in the wastebasket in the store.

“She was working. She didn’t want me around,” he said bitterly.

“So you left.”

“Yeah, I left.”

“When was that?”

“Around one-thirty.”

Again Sergeant Joyce shifted in her seat. Her stomach growled.

“But I came back,” Block added quickly.

April nodded. Okay, now they were getting to it.

“I was really upset. I, you know. I liked her. She was—different.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “She was from Massachusetts. Anybody in the world ever heard of Seekonk, Massachusetts?” He shrugged. Nobody.

“We had a fight, kind of. We’d go out to lunch like I said. We’d talk. We had to talk. I was going to do the accounting, at least I think I was. Maggie introduced me to Elsbeth, and you know. Elsbeth was going to try me out.”

“So what happened?”

“So I felt bad. I kind of ripped into Maggie about Olga. I told her if she wasn’t going to tell Elsbeth about Olga, I was. And then we got into this fight. So I came back later to make up.”

Nobody moved. The room had become hot and still. He liked the girl. There was the ring of absolute truth about that.

“I, uh, wanted to take her out to dinner. I knew she was hungry, she didn’t have lunch. So I—asked her.” He flushed, trying to swallow down the humiliation. “She said she already told me she wasn’t going out with me. I guess I lost it. I went crazy … I killed her.”

He was flushed all over, face purple, nose running unchecked. Hands shaking. He had confessed, and he was finished.

“Now can I see the D.A.?”

“How did you kill her?” April asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How did you kill Maggie?”

He looked at her as though she were stupid, pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose twice. “I, uh, strangled her.”

He could have read that in the newspapers. It was not good enough. April shook her head.

“How did it happen? When you got mad. What exactly did you do? What did Maggie do?”

“I told you—she didn’t want to be with me—you know, that way. So I lost it. I strangled her. What else do you want?”

Information that did more than put him on the scene. Something more than a slender motive. Something that connected him physically, directly with the crime. Something he could tell them that no one but the killer could know.

“Details,” April said quietly. “We want details.”

“You mean about the dress?”

“What dress?” Sanchez blurted out.

“The printed dress, size fourteen, she was wearing when I hung her on the chandelier.” A look of pure triumph galloped across Block’s homely, pinched little face at their electrified reaction. Got ’em. “Can I have a sandwich? I’m starved.”

Again he looked from one to the other.

April jumped up and went to the door with the window in it so she could place a lunch order with Officer Silvera. “Of course. What would you like?”

Neither Sergeant Joyce nor Sergeant Sanchez moved. Suddenly they had all day.

B
ut I did it,” Block protested, his whole body twitching with anguish and outrage when April finally said he could go, three hours and forty minutes later.

“Life’s tough, but stick around. We’ll get back to you,” she said as if he were applying for a job. Which in a sense he was.

“Stick around here?” he asked hopefully, lagging behind at the door of the stale questioning room guarded by a uniformed cop big enough to break his neck with one hand if he got out of line.

April shook her head. Why anybody would want to be indicted for murder, stand trial, and go to prison was beyond her. “Unh-unh, just don’t leave town.”

“But what else do you want?” he whined. “You know I did her.” Tears flooded the corners of his eyes and threatened to fall down his pale cheeks. He wiped them with the now-damp red handkerchief.

“Unh-unh,” April said again. “We just know you were there. You didn’t tell us how you killed her, Albert. Or what you used, or where her clothes are. Lot of things we still don’t know. You tell us everything, and you’re our man.”

“You’re letting me walk right out the door. I don’t believe it.”

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time the police questioned a killer and let him go. It wouldn’t be the last. April stood on the sidewalk outside the precinct with some blue uniforms, watching Albert trudge dejectedly to the corner, just to
make sure he really left. She was pretty sure he didn’t do it, even if he knew something no one else knew.

April saw him reach Columbus and turn the corner, then she went back inside. Three detectives would now start checking the background and activities of Albert Block. He’d eagerly agreed to a search of the rental apartment where he lived. Maybe something would turn up.

She wearily climbed up the stairs to the squad room, thinking it over. Block had the motive and the opportunity. He had the temper, and he felt guilty. But she didn’t figure him for a killer. She just didn’t. And she knew Sanchez didn’t either. She headed down the hall to the ladies’ room.

It smelled like a war zone. There was some kind of pink face powder peppering the bottom of the sink. It reminded her of the makeup smeared on Maggie Wheeler’s face. Not exactly done by an expert. Could that be Albert’s work? April wiped out the basin with some toilet paper, then splashed cold water on her face.

Since there didn’t appear to have been a robbery at the boutique, she figured it had to be someone who knew Maggie. Either Albert Block, or Bill Hadgens or some other guy they hadn’t a line on yet. April made a mental note to ask Elsbeth if anything—anything at all—was missing from the store.

She dried her face with more toilet paper. It was the cheapest city issue and felt like sandpaper. Still, they were lucky to have it. In the ladies’ rooms in the criminal courts downtown, there often wasn’t any paper at all.

On the other hand, maybe this was something else altogether. The murder had the composed look of a ritual, something a crazy would do for reasons of his own that weren’t rational, or easily explainable like Albert’s reasons. Most people who committed murder didn’t do weird, sadistic things to their victims afterward.

Well, Block was nuttier than Hadgens. She’d gone back to see Bill Hadgens a second time with a tape recorder an hour after her first visit to ask if he had any further recollections about Maggie. He hadn’t changed his clothes or gotten up since she first spoke to him, and didn’t seem to have many thoughts about anything. She taped his surly answers.
She’d compared his voice with the one on Maggie’s answering machine. It was negative for a match. She had the suspicion Albert Block’s would be, too.

So far they had
nada
that even connected Block and Maggie as lunch pals. The whole thing could be a figment of Block’s imagination. April had heard of cases where a psychic revealed one thing, one tiny detail, about a case that gave everything else he said a weird kind of credibility. She’d heard stories of hopeful detectives feeding a psychic (like they’d fed Albert Block), talking for days, trailing off on a bunch of wild goose chases, only to find out in the end that the one tiny thing the psychic “saw” was just a fluke. Could be that way with Albert. She had to check him out with the owner of All Dressed Up. Maybe he knew about Block’s relationship with Maggie.

April applied fresh lipstick and tossed it back in her black leather shoulder bag with the two interlocking C’s that she got in Chinatown and looked like a Chanel. It contained her off-duty gun, her Mace, a couple of notebooks, some pens, her telephone book—most precious possession—that had all the numbers of every source she’d ever used, a couple of packages of tissues for when she had to go to court and use the unequipped ladies’ room, her badge and wallet.

Her stomach churned with hunger. During his long questioning, Albert had eaten a triple-decker turkey, salami, Swiss, and chopped chicken liver sandwich with Russian dressing and then a huge slab of cheesecake. Neither she nor Sanchez nor Joyce had eaten anything themselves. As she headed back to the squad room, she hoped Mike might want to grab a bite and talk things over.

He got to her before she hit the door. He looked as if he’d been hanging around in the hall, waiting for her. “Where you been?” he demanded.

“Seeing Block out the door.
Qué pasa?”

“Magnífico. Hablas español.”
Sanchez grinned and told her
qué pasa en Español
.

“La cosa está que arde. La autopsia de Maggie Wheeler está lista. Vamos a buscarla.”

Something, something Maggie Wheeler. Shit. That was
the problem with this Spanish thing. You said something simple and got back something totally incomprehensible. April frowned. “Huh?”

“Never mind, you just started a few months ago.” Sanchez touched her arm and nodded toward the stairs.

“Vamos?”
To lunch, she hoped.

“M.E.’s office. The Wheeler autopsy report is in.”

Oh. April shook her head. She should have gotten
la autopsia está lista. Lista
meant ready. They headed out into the heat, her stomach still protesting. Lunch was clearly not on the menu.

T
he black lacquered mantel clock was just chiming ten
P.M
. when Emma returned Jason’s call. He sat in the living room, still in his suit trousers and dress shirt, working on half a glass of straight gin. At eight forty-five, after his last patient had left, he wandered out onto the street and turned left toward Broadway. He was hungry to the depths of his soul, hungry in a way he had never been before.

Ironically, Teddy, his last patient on Wednesdays, had talked for forty-five minutes about a dinner he’d had last night. Teddy was a food critic for a major magazine. Jason had to endure hearing a bite-by-bite account of a four-course meal so sublime and tempting he would have given a lot to share it. Jason didn’t usually let Teddy talk too much about food. It was bad for him, distracted him from his real problems and gave him a false sense of feeling better. Teddy always went to some fabulous restaurant either before or after his sessions with Jason, which Jason could never reveal drove him crazy.

Jason sipped his gin and felt the pressure ease. He had lived through therapy with surgeons who had described in excruciating detail every surgical procedure they did, with businessmen who talked about balance sheets and taxes who expected Jason to be up on
The Wall Street Journal
, with a chess player so intense and obsessed Jason had to learn the game to understand what he was talking about. There was more to his job than people thought.

Every kind of pathology was in the books on his shelves. The theory was, all manner of sickness could be described
and categorized. But a whole lot of cases weren’t just one thing, not just a character disorder, a personality problem, a garden-variety neurosis. Each human being was different, sang his own unique song. No matter what the books said about technique, the good doctor—the
really
good doctor—had to learn a new language and reinvent himself for each patient.

The myopic and chubby food critic’s highly erotic description of last night’s dinner was all the more poignant since his problem was impotence. Teddy’s conflicts about food and love were right in step with Jason’s own hunger for nourishment, for human warmth, and love. He certainly got no love from Teddy, who called Jason a food-and-wine know-nothing.

The remark stung all the more for being right on the mark. Jason decided to prove Teddy wrong. He headed for Zabar’s for something interesting and upscale to eat. Healthy gourmet salads like tabouleh, jambalaya, rice and beans, crawfish and wild rice. The sort of thing Emma liked. He walked slowly, legs aching a little from his run earlier in the day, dying inside because his wife had called and hadn’t called back. He meant to stay at home until they talked, but in the end he was starving and couldn’t wait.